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Summary
Deciding which yoga poses to include your YTT curriculum takes a little bit of thought! Often, we default to simply including the same postures that were taught in our own YTT – or think that we need to include them all. However, selecting which postures you would like to include in your manual and your program is an opportunity to consider how your choice of postures will support your larger training goals.
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Are you a yoga teacher trainer? Planning to launch a new 200-hour yoga teacher training program? If so, it’s important to consider which postures you would like to include as part of your curriculum.
I’m Rachel Scott, a yoga teacher trainer and an instructional designer who supports teachers and studios in creating excellent yoga education. In this article, we’ll take a deeper look at the “asana” section of your YTT.
For most teacher trainings focusing on postural yoga, asana provide the backbone of the program. If you are teaching a style that relies on set sequences (hot trainings, Ashtanga trainings), then choosing your included postures is easy! You’ll want to include all the postures in your set sequence, plus options for common adaptations and modifications.
However if you are offering a YTT that does not have a set sequence (for example, my training teaches people to create sequences in the peak pose style, so there are a lot of postures to choose from), you have the opportunity to select postures that will serve your program intentions.
It may be tempting to simply include every asana you can think of in your asana guide. After all, why not provide students with an encyclopedia for reference?
While listing all possible asana may seem tempting, it’s more helpful for your training manual to focus on the poses that you want your students to understand. While sticking eka pada galavasana in there may be fun, it’s unlikely that your students would practice – let alone attempt to teach! – such a complex pose.
Also, if the pose is in the manual, your students may think that they should be able to teach it upon graduation. Help your students focus on doing the basics well rather than worrying about how to teach poses with all the bells and whistles (save those “wild and crazy postures” for your 300 hour or advanced trainings :)).
First of all, it’s important to distinguish between postures that you want students to practice and that you want them to teach.
For example, in my 200-hour, I teach students to practice shoulderstand, but I am clear with them that I do not expect them to teach this pose yet (I save that for my 300-hour). We practice this pose so that they may learn it as part of their personal practice. (As a side note, I refrain from having them teach shoulderstand because I require them to teach it with a lot of props. Other styles of teacher training may not have a similar perspective and may allow students to teach this pose earlier.)
If there are poses that you include in the training for the sake of expanding their personal practice rather than for them to teach, I would encourage you to be explicit about your expectations.
I am a fan of dividing postures into “families” of similar types so that students can more easily recognize similar actions and alignments across a range of postures.
In my YTT manual, I have the following posture families:
You can check out my Asana Guide here. I prefer to group postures anatomically, but you may group them by the sections of your sequence. For example:
In my Yin YTT, for example, I group postures by their “target area,” but you could also group them by “affected meridian.”
If you are offering a “well-rounded” YTT, I would suggest including poses from each of the families described above. Avoid the trap of including exotic, complex poses, and instead stick to foundational poses that will best support your trainees to understand alignment and action. Your students will be well-served if they understand and can teach others how to do relatively accessible postures well by the completion of your training.
Poses to include (this is not an exhaustive list, but will give you an idea):
Each of these postures is fairly accessible and relatively safe to teach, but provides your students with a wealth of opportunity to understand risks, contraindications, alignment, and action.
An “asana guide” section of your manual that outlines and describes key information for each asana is an excellent student resource. In this section, it can be helpful to include the following information about each pose:
Optional
I also suggest including several photos of the pose with adaptations and variations.
Selecting which asana to include in your program is a creative and intentional decision that provides a strong backbone for your training. Choose postures that you actually want your students to be able to teach skillfully and safely by the time they graduate. By being selective about the postures that you are including, you will help students focus on teaching foundational postures with alignment and clarity rather than feeling pressured to teach complex, flashy, or riskier poses before they are ready.
Rachel supports yoga teachers and studios around the world to create transformational education experiences that help them thrive in their business, share their passion, and inspire more people to practice yoga. Her extensive knowledge and experience include: earning two masters degrees, authoring three books, leading 4,000+ hours of TT, building a teacher training college for a national yoga company, and working behind the scenes in yoga studio & teacher management for more than fifteen years. As a writer and speaker, she continually wrestles with the juicy bits of life: relationships, authenticity, and discovering meaning in this crazy, wildish world. E-RYT 500, YACEP, BA, MFA, MSci. Learn more about Rachel.
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